The Paideia Program

...He is also, the author of Aristotle for Everybody, a book whose title tells you everything you need to know about the scholastic philosophy of the Paideia Group...

...This, needless to say, is poppycock...

...Augustine's Confessions...

...Like so many of the related books and reports, the Paideia volumes argue stridently that our schools are failing our society, when at least half the truth may be precisely the reverse...

...Most are written or co-written by the several panelists, whose individual voices we now hear for the first time...

...There are the severely dyslexic...

...THE PAIDEIA PROGRAM Edited by Mortimer J. Adler/Macmillan/$7.95...

...Bowing to the "pluralistic character" that is among the professional educationists' most revered totems, Adler and his battle-weary Paideia Group (22 influential with varying claims to authority in the field) no longer present "a single specified curriculum to be uniformly adopted throughout the United States...

...Or whether the most basic goals of mass education are identical to or even compatible with those of classical learning or technocratic scholarship...

...Augustine's Confessions or Oedipus Rex is the solution to their problems...

...nevertheless, they largely share Adler's own sterile, abstract schematicism ("Three kinds of teaching and learning," "Five errors to be avoided," etc...

...It's entirely possible that American schools and teachers aren't what they used to be, but then what is...

...One begins to wonder whether it is not the teacher who likes discontinuity and interruption as a substitute for serious work...

...If it all sounds vaguely like the half-dozen pages Aristotle devoted to education in the Politics, give yourself a gold star...

...Excitement, anyway, is an occasional feeling and not the proper mood for learning...

...Supreme Court...

...Since the typical public high school system needs all year to gear up for Arbor Day, you don't have to be a confirmed cynic to harbor a few doubts about so remarkably speedy and comprehensive a recovery...

...There are, for example, the acutely hyperactive, one of whom can disrupt a class of thirty for as long as you care to watch...

...Not surprisingly, more than a few readers suspected that was what The Paideia Proposal had hit upon...

...Or it may be that what Adler had in mind was something more along the lines of Aspen Institute, the hyperaf-fluent drop-in center where he sometimes leads current-issues seminars for culture-climbing corporate types-'Heraclitus and Hi-Tech: Can the Pre-Socratics Put You on the Executive Ladder...

...3.95 paper James Harkness The Paideia Program concludes Mortimer Adler's insistently alliterative trilogy on American schooling, and it bears some scars from the slings and arrows tossed at its two predecessors...

...From kindergarten through the 12th grade, youngsters should pursue a single course of study, regardless of differences among themselves, their teachers, and their communities...

...Paideia II did offer a summary report on an experiment carried out at Skyline High School in Oakland, a comprehensive urban institution whose 2,000 students were 40 percent black, 46 percent white, and 14 percent Asian American...

...Jacques Barzun, on the other hand, has evidently proved himself a team player by coming up with a paper for publication, but what he has to say about teaching history could hardly have endeared him to his "maieutic" colleagues: Teachers brought up on "methods" may be convinced that good teaching consists in a succession of...

...Instead, they proffer "a curricular framework within which a variety of curriculums can be soundly constructed, appropriate to the particular circumstances of different school districts...

...No small body of evidence, for instance, suggests that the single largest influence on whether Johnny (or Juan, or Juanita) can read is verbal exposure in infancy-whether parents and other adults spoke frequently around and to the child, whether they read aloud in the home, whether they used a broad English vocabulary and pronounced their words distinctly...

...Probably it's sheer blasphemy to ask whether reading St...

...Much of Boyer's own recent book High School (1983), based on extensive first-hand examinations of school systems nationwide, runs counter to the thrust of the Paideia program, and he has taken subtle pains to divorce himself from its position...

...According to Adler, students and teachers alike were thrilled by the project reading list, which included the Iliad, Oresteia Trilogy, Declaration of Independence, Plato's Republic, the Nichomachean Ethics, The Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Tartuffe, Candide, Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights, 1984, and St...

...These, in any event, are questions to which The Paideia Program and companion volumes never get around...

...Nor are they going to exert a lot of control over the swelling percentage of students living in single-parent households...

...the growing number of physically abused youngsters or those emotionally bruised by divorce and related strife...

...Mom, Dad, or at least Grandpa was usually around to see that homework was finished regularly, or to go to Parents' Night for a chat with Miss Kopechne about whether Ellie Beth really ought to linger quite so pliantly with the boys from the mechanical arts class...

...If Junior nodded out during first period for three weeks running, somebody eventually found out at home...

...That doesn't necessarily prove today's schools are thriving centers of academic excellence...

...The Paideia Program consists of a dozen-plus essays written to set out in concrete detail just what a Paideia school would be and do...

...Both students and teachers are to reimmerse themselves in languages, literature, the fine arts, mathematics, natural science, history, geography, and social studies, with auxiliary work in phys-ed and manual arts and a brief introduction to careers...

...Set upon so flawed a foundation, the essays sketching how to implement The Paideia Program tend to collapse of their own weight...

...or the steadily increasing amount of time students spend wired into television and videogames instead of print...

...It may only mean that they play a smaller part in nurturing ambition and native ability than the educationists would like us to think...

...Kids and families are certainly different...

...A generation ago, there were considerably fewer families where both parents worked outside the home...

...There are no unteachable children," Adler intones in the initial book-and in the final one, "all are educable in exactly the same sense of the term...

...For all the flaccid jargon and labored devices (including, in one book, an ap-pendix listing everybody who had "input" into Paideia Groupthink), all three volumes rest upon a fundamental piety-a Paideia platitude, as it were...

...All you need is to see the agonized bafflement on the face of the kid who's trying to make change for you at the local McDonald's, or the panicked eyes of the checker at Shop-Rite when her computerized cash register beeps its shrill protest at an improper command...

...H.L...

...A few months ago, the U.S...

...In the meantime, curiously enough, a substantial number of American kids somehow learn enough to run businesses, design computer chips, write novels, make movies, and invent all manner of new or better mousetraps...

...But with such vacuous officialese draws to a close public education's latest season of discontent-a menopausal doldrum followed by the predictable self-congratulation that terminates the natural life cycle of any bureaucratic brouhaha...

...All three of the Paideia books include a tidy illustration charting how to use lecturing, coaching, and "maieutic" methods in each of the indispensable disciplines...

...At present Mortimer Adler is director of the Institute for Philosophical Research and chairman of the board of editors of Encyclopedia Britannica...

...Indeed, reading through The Paideia Proposal, you couldn't help being struck by an image of Mrs...

...Or whether "fostering analytical/life skills" is really what art, literature, history, and philosophy are all about...

...The initial Paideia premise (it's tough not to get caught up in the monkey business with ps) was that there exists a core of academic subjects that forms the sine qua non of general education...

...Shacklemeyer's second graders crowded into some suburban agora, interacting on a plane of intellectual intensity that would make Socrates' dialogues with his followers sound like the happy chat of a local TV news team...

...Assuming curricular content to lie at the heart of declining performance by schools and students alike, Adler and company substitute reflexive elitist curmudgeonry for any serious look at the impact on public schools of at least a century of social, cultural, and technological upheaval...

...Adler uses the term in an "extended" sense to connote the general learning he believes should be the shared heritage of all human beings...

...imaginative" devices, to make history "come alive" and keep the class "excited" about learning...

...For one thing, Adler and his colleagues seemed to consider anticipating objections equivalent to rebutting them-a fallacy to which any good Aristotelian ought to throw up his hands...

...Mencken once observed that every complex problem has a simple solution-the wrong one...

...Now, short of revolutionary social restructuring, teachers aren't going to have much to say about such matters, or most other things that happen to kids during the crucial years between birth and 3-4 years old...

...One is Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who gets a pat on the back for not contributing an essay...

...Whether there's something wrong with American schooling isn't at issue, and you need neither national commissions nor private panels to prove it...

...Two Paideia Group members do deserve singling out for praise...

...The content must be broad and liberal: "All sidetracks, specialized courses, or electives must be eliminated," since they serve only to dilute the quality of learning or at best to provide technical training for jobs in later life...

...secretary of education declared with effusive gratitude that actions taken in response to A Nation at Risk have already had a measurable effect on the average scores of high school seniors on standardized tests...

...Since not one of these tomes was intended by its author as light fare for young adults, it beats me why the Paideia Group thought it was critical for working-class teenagers to read them...

...But observation and interviews with the young suggest, on the contrary, that these exercises induce boredom in those who want to learn and are taken as relief from work by those who do not...

...While The Paideia Proposal (1982) and Paideia Problems and Possibilities (1983) staunchly upheld the ideal of a uniform and universal curriculum as a rallying standard for educational reform, the final volume clearly manifests a flagging purist zeal...

...There is the odd young sociopath who has no business at all laying hands on a scalpel in biology lab, but whose inalienable right to dissect leopard frogs is guaranteed by bodies ranging from the local PTA right up to the U.S...

...hence primary and secondary schools should concern themselves with that and that alone...

...For the blushing reader whose classical Greek falters, paideia ("py-dee-a," volunteers the dedication page of volume one) comes from pais, paidos, the upbringing of a James Harkness is a writer who lives in upstate New York...

...Any practicing teacher knows there are plenty of unteachable children, or at least children whose prior resistances to formal learning are so deeply seated that it's silly to lay the blame at the schoolhouse door...

...In addition, it was painfully obvious that most of the Paideia panelists were affiliated with colleges and universities, resolute theoreticians at a lofty remove from K-12 school systems...

...Paideia Problems and Possibilities, the second book, tried to respond to such criticisms, without notable success...

...There are chronically malnourished kids, whose attention not even the most pyrotechnic instructor will hold for more than moments at a time...

...child...

...There are also strong contingents of precocious druggies, pre-teen alcoholics, Hispanics and other ethnics who pick up one English word in three-every last one of them, God help us, mainstreamed into the general student body by "humanistic" mandates that just happen to cost the taxpayers a bundle less than the kind of special programs that might conceivably do some good...